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Software "Robots" - Processes or work automation

  • I have being toying with the idea of creating software “Robots” to help on different areas of the development process, repetitive task, automatable task, etc.
    I have quite a few ideas where to begin.
    My problem is that I work mostly alone, as a freelancer, and work tends to pill up, and I don’t like to extend or “blow” deadline dates.
    I have investigated and use quite a few productivity tools. I have investigated CodeGeneration and I am projecting a tool to generate portions of code. I use codeReuse techniques. Etc.
    Any one as toughs about this ? as there any good articles.
      October 16, 2021 1:31 PM IST
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  • I wouldn't like to use code generation, but I have developed many tools to help me do many of the repetitive tasks.

    Some of these could do nice things:

    Email Robots

    These receive emails and do a lot of stuff with them, they need to have some king of authentication to protect you from the bad stuff :

    • Automatically logs whatever was entered in a database or excel spreadsheet.
    • Updates something in a database.
    • Saves all the attachments in a specific shared folder.
    • Reboot a server.

    Productivity

    These will do repetitious tasks:

    • Print out all the invoices for the month.
    • Automatically merge data from several sources.
    • Send reminders of GTD items.
    • Send reminders of late TODO items.
    • Automated builds
    • Automated testing

    Administration

    These automate some repetitive server administration tasks:

    • Summarize server logs, remove regular items and send the rest by email
    • Rebuild indexes in a database
    • Take automatic backups
      December 29, 2021 12:58 PM IST
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  • Meta-programming is a great thing. If you easily get access to the data about the class structure then you can automate a few things. In the high level language I use, I define a class like 'Property' for example. Add an integer for street number, a string for street name and a reference to the owning debtor. I then auto generate a form that has a text box for street number and street name, a lookup box for the debtor reference and the code to save and load is all auto-generated. It knows that street number is an integer so its text box can only accept integers. If I declare a read only property it will also make sure the text box is read only.

     
      December 31, 2021 12:18 PM IST
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